Crucial has recently released the BX100 series of SSDs, which are characterized as "entry-level" drives engineered to outperform a hard drive and deliver cost-effective performance.

Available in capacities of 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, the drive promises to deliver 535 MB/s sequential reads on both compressible and incompressible data.

Interestingly, Crucial has chosen to use the Silicon Motion's 2246EN controller with 16nm 128Gbit NAND, for these new drives, which is change from Crucial's usual Marvell designs. Obviously, SM2246EN is cheaper to procure than the equivalent Marvell part, although it should perform well.

Feature wise the BX100 does not support the features of the Crucial "M" series of SSDs, so there is no hardware-accelerated encryption or SLC caching.

Below you see the BX100's specs:

As you can see, Micron/Crucial has managed to offer increased write speeds at the lower capacities, at least compared to the MX 100 series, which is based on the same NAND. The MX100 was limited to 300 MB/sec at 256GB and 150 MB/sec at 128GB. The BX100 shows a 70 MB/sec improvement at 250GB and a 35 MB/sec improvement at 120GB.

Our review sample has a capacity of 1TB and supports sequential read speeds of up to 535 MB/s, sequential write up to 450 MB/s and 90K/70K for random read and write IOPS, respectively.